Minnesota radio parodied on SNL

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If you didn’t catch Saturday Night Live this weekend, it sounds like you didn’t miss much (aside from the always-on-point musical guest Jack White). As one of the skits written for SNL host Lindsay Lohan, the show took a pathetic stab at relevance by mocking a Top 40 radio station’s morning show here in Minnesota; trouble is, in addition to the skit being throughly un-funny, it seems to be a parody of a radio station that no longer exists.

Yes, the closest thing Minnesota has ever had to the fictional B108 station in the skit is the now-defunct B96, which went off the air in 2010 after nearly a decade when the station shifted from a hip-hop format to a more pop-heavy Top 40 station 96.3 NOW (and, just this year, to the more alternative/adult-contemporary station K-TWIN). But the similarities hit close enough to home that it led me to wonder: Did some SNL writer, scrambling for a sketch idea, unearth a YouTube video of B96’s heyday for inspiration?

As one particularly astute commenter on Gimme Noise pointed out, B96 hip-hop correspondent Peter Parker regularly conducted interviews at Soundset out in Shakopee, the same city where the fictional station is set. Additionally, SNL writer Erik Kenward is originally from Owatonna.

For reference, here’s the SNL skit:

While the skit aired, former B96 morning show host Tony Fly tweeted, “I feel like I’ve worked at this station. #SNL” Here’s video of him interviewing a supremely Minnesotan woman about her Go Girl products that does seem quite similar to the sketch:

And here’s a clip of Peter Parker, who just tweeted today, “I used to work at this radio station #B96 #LOL,” interviewing St. Paul Slim back in the B96 days: